Glenn Branca’s “The Light (for David)”

In the program notes for Glenn Branca’s concert last night at Roulette, Branca talks about Bowie’s death: “I don’t know what else to say. It hurts.” It sets up emotions as a crucial component–capturing and working through a feeling.

Branca has a long and controversial history in his area of music (think John Cage, for example, who was not a fan to put it mildly), but the concert last night, performed by the Glenn Branca Ensemble, felt tame and controlled.

Branca’s Ensemble carries four guitar players, one bass player and drums, with Branca himself at the front conducting in a style that directly mirrors this music, bracing and raising each new wave of sound with his whole body.

It was a program with two works: The Third Ascension (six movements and two tuning changes) and the world premiere of “The Light (for David).” I can’t say exactly what set individual works apart. Branca is more of a total-performance deal than a piece-by-piece experience. He seemed to recognize this himself, muttering that “We were only getting started” and “This one’s a bitch,” connecting the works together in a developing sequence.

But a sequence of what? Given the type of big dissonant sound (all audience members were given a set of free ear plugs), the environment was controlled by structure from the half circle of music stands on stage to the resolution that greeted us at each end. It made for an odd combination of chaos and restraint, with emphasis on the latter.

My brother (who had covered my program with the words “HELTER SKELTER” as question about the point of the experience) caught Branca in between pieces and asked him, “What’s more important, structure or emotion?” And Branca answered, “I don’t know, emotion?”

For a world premiere like this, emotion makes sense, but you have to wonder about the potential left behind in the realm that this music comes out of.

About Me

Sydney Boyd is a critic and scholar in Houston, TX. She holds degrees in both English and music and currently works as a Spatial Studies Postdoctoral Fellow in the Humanities Research Center at Rice University. She studies how music shapes narrative temporalities in 20th-century literature and, occasionally, returns to her origins as a violinist.